Battle: LA (12A) ****

Battle: LA (12A) **** Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Ne-Yo. Dir: Johnathon Liebesman

With alien invasion, action fuelled epic Battle: LA, you definitely get a lot of bang for your buck.

The film primarily follows Staff Sergeant Nantz (Eckhart), a soldier stationed outside LA when aliens, under the guise of a meteor shower, begin to attack earth. He is placed second in command of a unit tasked with clearing a zone that is to be bombed of civilians, under 2nd Lieutenant Martinez (R Rodriguez).

Along the way, the squads' disapproval of Nantz grows, as rumours about an accident in his last tour spread, fuelling the anger of Corporal Kevin Harris (Ne-Yo).

The aliens soon prove themselves to be tough foes, killing most of the unit with some pretty cool weapons which don't just leave holes in people and blow stuff up, they burn the soldiers' armour and flsesh as well. If that wasn't enough, the aliens soon prove extremely tough to kill, one of which having most of a machine gun magazine emptied into it and still surviving, before the sodliers eventually blow it up with a grenade.

After walking straight into an ambush, the remainder of the unit meets Sergeant Elena Santos (M Rodriguez), who is out to find the aliens' command centre.

Once all of the main characters have been established, the action really kicks off, with barely a break between aliens and humans exchanging bullets and respectively blowing all sorts of vehicles and buildings up.

The visual effects are brilliant, showing how well CG has developed since the nearest comparable movie of this type, 1997's Independence Day.

There are more parallels to Independence Day to be made, including very similar endings, and a cliche fuelled morale boosting speech, which gives the film an overall feeling that it is a giant propoganda campaign saying how great the American military is. The only part of the film which lets it down, it's almost as though the script-writer was either deliberately over the top with the characters dialogue, or had been put up to it by some top brass.

Despite the sometimes painful cliches, the film proves to be very entertaining, with action, and even a point which was so blatently obvious that something was going to happen, that the shock manages to get you without you intending it to.